Hamilton childish to tweet telemetry, says Anderson

3 September 2012 – Gary Anderson believes Lewis Hamilton showed his immaturity by posting confidential McLaren technical data into the public domain on Twitter. In Belgium, the 2008 World Champion attempted to show fans the differences between his own fastest qualifying lap and that of Jenson Button, but was duly asked to remove the message.

Significantly slower than his team-mate, Hamilton had reverted to McLaren’s previous specification of rear wing which quickly proved to be the wrong decision.

“I believe Button's incredible lap in the second part of qualifying, which was 0.909 seconds quicker than Hamilton's, freaked Lewis out,” Anderson, former Technical Director for Jordan and now technical correspondent for the BBC, says on the BBC Sport website.

“It looks as if Hamilton could not cope with that, messed up the top ten shootout and then started tweeting stupid stuff. Hamilton is not a kid anymore. He is 27, he is a leading Grand Prix driver and an ex World Champion. He has credibility, so to tweet some of the stuff he did on Saturday night, with the language contained in it, was not befitting of his status. I would say it was childish. If he was my driver, he would have got a ticking-off after the first tweet, but that does not happen these days.”

Referring to the telemetry tweet in particular, Anderson believes this was a serious act which should have been dealt with more severely by Martin Whitmarsh and McLaren.

“That is completely unacceptable,” continues the Northern Irishman, who has designed race-winning F1 cars. “While it does not reveal anything too significant, to open up that cupboard of information just shows how naïve Hamilton is, how little he understands the big picture. F1 is about being secret squirrel.”

Hamilton’s race ended as quickly as it had begun, as the Englishman was squeezed onto the grass by Romain Grosjean before piling into Fernando Alonso at La Source.

Social Media

Check out our community:

About us

GPUpdate.net, the daily motorsport news website which is celebrating over a decade of the latest in Formula 1, publicly dates back to 1998.
Founded as F1Racing.net, the online magazine is part of JHED Media BV, a registered company operating out of The Netherlands.